To paraphrase the Buddha’s conversation with Angulimala (the murderer) “We are all running!”, running away from ourselves. On the weekend of May 1-3 2015, I will be leading a Running with the Mind of Meditation workshop at Hawkwood College, (www.hawkwoodcollege.org.uk) in the cotswolds near Stroud. The w/e is inspired by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche’s book and teaching, and my own experience of integrating running and meditation.I am a psychotherapist and a qualified neurotic so there are often a lot of thoughts and feelings flowing through me. When running, I literally run out some of the physical impact of people’s emotional distress and work with my own resistance or doubt. I love running and at the same time I hate it. Almost every time I set out and run there is a grumpy teenager moment of “Uhh! do I have to!” During the run I often feel a moment of that is enough, my body wants to stop. I can then stop or I can notice the thought and sensation in the body and simply relax and wait to see if it continues or it dissipates. If I really feel like stopping, I stop or walk or make the route shorter and if the feeling/thought disspates, I continue. It doesn’t matter. What matters is my relationship to myself. Running provides me with a great opportunity to challenge myself, to feel a sense of freedom and confidence in my body that I can travel over hill and dale under my own energy. This is such an antidote to the modern age when we are often relying on gadgets and things. Running with the mind of meditation is about being with our running; paying full attention to the experience of running in our mind and body rather than distracting ourselves from the effort by listening to music or focusing on the goal. This includes feeling where each foot makes contact with the ground, taking in our sense perceptions, what we hear and smell, feeling the breath and the physical exertion of our body and being aware of the focus of our mind.

We may all have different motivations to run: to get fit, to develop discipline or to gain a sense of achievement. We can do all this with a sense of will, an underlying aggression of trying to overcome our body. Or we can have the same motivations and run with a sense of gentleness that respects our body’s limitations, the weather conditions, our mood of the day and our own timetable of what needs attending to. We can set ourselves a reasonable target in this context and feel good, a positive sense of satisfaction when we achieve it.

“If we do not push ourselves enough, we do not grow, but if we push ourselves too much, we regress. What is enough will change, depending on where we are and what we are doing. In that sense, the present moment is always some kind of beginning.” (Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche)Although on an outer level, running is about the body, ultimately it is about the mind. Everything we experience, we experience through the mind: so for example when we feel pain, it is not so much about the feeling of pain in the body at that moment but how the mind reacts or relates to the feeling of pain. Does it represent a sense of defeat or failure or bring up fear that we are not going to make it or that we are not capable? When our body and mind are synchronised we experience joy, a natural self-exisitng energy. Running wih the mind of meditation is simply attending and being fully present to the flow of experience in and outside of us.

Anxiety is a normal and everyday experience and yet now it is almost universally viewed as problematic. The majority of people who go to see their doctor, do so because they feel anxious, or because they try not to feel anxious and have shut down their feelings. Anxiety is the body getting prepared to meet a challenge; in essence it is our aliveness. The problem is in how we relate to it. Neuroscientists say that the physiological component of emotion lasts 90 seconds, and the only way that we feel things for longer is that we keep them going by constantly retriggering the emotion by thought. This is what happens in ruminative thinking when people can get stuck in feeling depressed. Thus the way out of this cycle is to not get lost in the thought but to come back to the body, to directly feel sensation in the body, moment by moment which in itself calms the nervous system.

In order to do this we need the confidence, belief and experience that this is possible. What is most frightening about feeling anxious is that it feels alien, (wrong). As a culture the feeling of anxiety is unfamiliar to us; it is not valued and we have very few cultural references for embracing what is happening within us. John Beebe (Integrity in Depth, 1995) calls anxiety a "...starting point for the discovery of integrity." Thus we need to see anxiety as a response to people's life situations and of the world in general. How can we honour what is being called out from us. People need support to engage with this rather than suppress it through medication.

We are not in control, although we can have a profound influence on our life and those of others. Anxiety is the antidote to being in control which can stifle and squash our life-force. It is precisely the feeling of being in control, in command of our environment, as if the world is an object of our desire, that leads to economic and environmental and social collapse. Being able to rest in our vulnerability as people as groups/organisations and society is one of the key pathways to creating a more sustainable and kinder future.